Black and grey handprint and footprint tattoo with script name and Roman numerals on an upper arm.

Handprint and footprint with name on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A handprint and a footprint sit on the upper arm, with a name in cursive script and a line of Roman numerals beside them. The prints are shaded in soft grey with smooth gradients, while the lettering is in crisp black linework. The photograph has a warm sepia tone, and the tattoos are framed against the arm and a dark sleeveless top.

Lettering Upper arm Footprint Name Script Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clay had stiffened overnight, so Ada Pryce breathed on the slab from the kettle's steam before she let the boy press his hand into it. Wilf splayed his fingers the way she'd told him, tongue between his teeth, and she ran the wooden tool around his palm so the edge would hold. Then came the foot, bare and cold from the yard, and he wobbled on the heel while she steadied his shoulder with one floury hand. Outside the window the frost had furred the lane white, and the bakery's chimney was breathing out the first smoke of the morning.

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She scratched his name into the corner with a bent nib, WILF, and beneath it the date in the old Roman figures her father had always insisted on, because the kiln ledger was kept that way and nobody in the village had ever complained. Wilf wanted to know if the tile would remember him when it was fired. Ada told him the fire would remember for her, and that was the only promise a potter could honestly make. She set the slab on the board to dry in the cold room, where it would stay pale and patient until spring.

The tiles went into the kiln in March and came out a cloudy blue-grey under the glaze, the prints sunk just deep enough to catch the light from the side. The harbour wall had them set into its steps that summer, a row of small hands and feet that the gulls ignored and the tourists stooped to touch. Ada never went down to see them. She heard, years later, that a grown man had stopped on the steps one wet afternoon, laid his palm over the tile, and stood there until the tide came in around his boots.